Nehru: The grand revival

Such are the tribulations of our current, turbulent era, that it is almost unfashionable to commemorate the 122th birth anniversary of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

Such are the tribulations of our current, turbulent era, that it is almost unfashionable to commemorate the 122th birth anniversary of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. However, with the current global economic crisis running amok, Nehru’s paradigms have bounced back.

Pro-market liberalisation, anti-Nehru commentators, are now forced to acknowledge the inevitable: that the indigenous, self reliant, manufacturing and financial base built by Nehru, plus state intervention in economy set into motion by him, saved India from incurring the crippling cost of the global meltdown.

The huge Indian market that the world doesn’t tire talking about is basically a result of Nehruvian investment in education, health, employment and human resources. An unapologetic Marxist, Nehru was never a supporter of the command economy. While giving a major role to the public sector, Nehru retained private ownership. He curbed monopolistic capitalist practices for he understood that unchecked capitalism can only wreak havoc in India’s small peasant economy.

In 1944, Indian capitalists themselves brought out a `Bombay plan’, which called for a massive investment by the state. In this plan, Indian private capital acknowledged its critical weakness with regards to nation building.

Today’s generation might find this hard to understand, but it is impossible to build a truly dynamic capitalist economy, and a modern nation, without demolishing feudalism and initiating land reforms in villages. India could create a middle class in the countryside only because surplus zamindari land was distributed amongst the peasantry. Furthermore, land reforms released labour, stuck in medieval practices in villages, for India’s expanding industries.

Yet, along with feudal elements, conservative right wing lobby of traders blocked Nehru’s every move. The sad part is that more often than not India’s nascent capitalist class also did not fully back Nehru’s progressivism. Nehru faced conservative-non modern-right wing opposition from within the Congress; he also had to bear the brunt of regressive pulls exercised by the RSS. The right wing and the RSS did not even support Parliamentary democracy and the equal rights given to minorities, women and Dalits in the Indian constitution.

Right wing forces blame Nehru for partition—a communal-fascist organization like RSS does not even have the sense to see the contradiction in its advocacy of akhand bharat, while upholding, at the same time, blind hatred for Pakistan. Nehru was an intellectual-politician, an academically sound but a practical historian with a deep, intuitive-political grasp of the currents of Indian and world history and statecraft.

Nehru did not choose partition. If things were as simple as `making Jinnah the PM would have avoided partition’, Nehru might have readily agreed to step back. Nehru stuck to an ideological issue: he did not agree to the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan which divided India into three zones on the basis of religion. Earlier, in the 1930s, Nehru opposed the Muslim League proposal of unity on the basis of the Congress recognizing the League as the sole representative of Muslims. Under that scenario, Congress would have become the sole representative of Hindus. The British, RSS and the Muslim League wanted that to happen—but Nehru flatly refused to reduce Congress to a party pandering to identity politics. Nehru knew that no modern nation building would accrue from medieval religious identities. Nehru was interested in the evolution of a modern Indian—not Hindu or Muslim, or Dalit or Christian—identity for his country.

In this, Nehru was supported by progressive-reformist elements from all castes and creeds in India. Maulana Hussein Ahmed Madani, the leading Deobandi Ulema of pre-Independence India, wrote a pamphlet on composite nationalism, which debunked Jinnah’s idea of nation building based on religion. Nehru harnessed the immense energy of India’s Left movement to the field of culture and cinema. He gave India an anti-Imperialist foreign policy, which despite adjustments to the new post-Soviet word order, still guarantees Indian leadership in several world affairs.

Conservatives foolishly contrast Patel’s toughness on Hyderabad with Nehru’s soft approach on Kashmir. Nehru believed in the will of the people. His decision to use force in Hyderabad was premised on the popular movement there, which was being suppressed by the armed forces of the Nizam. In Kashmir, popular sentiment was in India’s favour, while Hari Singh, the King, wavered and even considered ceding his territory to Pakistan. Nehru acted swiftly by sending Indian troops in Kashmir during the 1947-48 crisis—but knowing well the history of Kashmir, and popular aspirations for autonomy within India, Nehru, while reaffirming Kashmir as an integral part of India, allowed Kashmiris their own pace and time. It was geopolitics, mistakes by post-1970s Indian and Kashmiri politicians, and distortions emerging out of America’s beguiling, proxy anti-Soviet war—not Nehru—that created terrorism in Kashmir.

Nehru’s left-of-centre, democratic, third world nationalism, saved India from the fate of other third world countries who chose the quasi-socialist but autocratic—or pro-American, dictatorial—path after gaining Independence from colonial rule. Nehru was Mahatama Gandhi’s true heir—he left behind an ideological tradition of secular, plural, pro-poor nation building. While his ideology ruled the country, subversion/infiltration by RSS and foreign Imperialist powers was zero. It is this legacy that has been picked up in the 21st century by a young man: Rahul Gandhi. By Amaresh Misra